The news of Google’s Street View cars collecting WiFi data has been echoed around the internet for a while now. Now, obviously this is a Bad Thing that they shouldn’t have been doing, and there should have been internal checks in place to make sure it didn’t happen. Fine, I agree. But the fact that it did happen doesn’t make them evil, as a lot of people seem to be saying. According to the official blog entry at least (which I don’t have any particular reason to doubt), it was a mistake. Mistakes happen, and a large organization like Google is going to have a correspondingly large number of them.

Now, think about it from the perspective of the Google people. Once they found out this happened, they couldn’t go back in time and prevent it. The data had already been collected, the news had already been released. Under the circumstances, deleting the data and shutting down the WiFi scanning was pretty much all they could do. Rereading the blog post, it occurs to me that this is pretty much the kind of reaction I’d want to see from a company in their situation: admit the mistake, discard any inappropriately collected data, and outline a plan to prevent it from happening again. So in this case I actually think Google is living up to their motto.